He got out of here. He saved himself. I think, to some degree, he had known he had killed him." -- Carly Gibson on driver who killed her cousin

Family members who saw 6-year-old Shaud Wilson struck by a car at Paris Avenue and Lafreneire Street say the driver of the gray Honda Crosstour stayed on the scene for about two minutes Monday morning before he sped away. Time during moments of crisis is a tricky thing, and it is often the case that people involved in accidents and other calamities say they feel that things happened in slow motion. That's another way of saying, of course, that time slowed down, that something that happened in a second or less seemed to take forever.

It could be the case that the driver who fatally struck Shaud and injured his sister Shanaya Wilson didn't hang around half as long as the first-grader's grieving family say he did. But let's assume that Shaud's family members are right and that the driver who struck and killed the boy sat still in his car as family rushed to the boy's aid and picked up his body from the ground.

What is that driver thinking? Is he in shock? Has time slowed down for him? Is he indifferent? Is he frightened? Is he asking, "Oh, God, what have I done?" What does he see? Does he twist his neck around to count potential witnesses? Does he think of handcuffs and jail cells, courtrooms and prison?

As he sits there still is he hoping that the boy will wiggle a finger or move his foot, demonstrate somehow that he's alive and has a fighting chance? Somebody's lifting the child's body off the asphalt now. He will carry him into the family's home in the 3500 block of Paris Avenue.

Can the driver see from the way the boy's body droops that he's going to die? Is he dead already? Is the driver thinking of the boy at all, or is he more relieved that the obstruction in the road, the obstruction he caused, has now been removed?

It takes me two minutes to read aloud everything I've written above. I wanted to get a sense of what two minutes felt like, how much a person could sit and contemplate in 120 seconds. If the person who hit the boy Monday morning hadn't stopped at all and had just kept going, his actions would have been despicable enough. But somehow it seems even worse to hear that he hung around for a couple minutes and then sped away. He had time to consider everything and still left.

Cousin Carly Gibson said the driver made his getaway after Errol Martin, another cousin, picked up Shaud to take him into his house.

Then, she said, the driver "just rolled straight past him. He almost hit my cousin and Shaud again, trying to get away.

"He got out of here. He saved himself. I think, to some degree, he had known he had killed him."

If the police are correct, the driver got away only temporarily and didn't save himself at all. About 5 1/2 hours after the 7 a.m. accident police found the damaged Honda at Arthur Toledano's home on Charlton Drive, about 14 blocks from the crime scene. Police say Toledano stepped out of his home and admitted that he had been involved in a crash. Toledano was taken to a police station where, police say, he confessed to fleeing the scene of the crash. Police booked him with manslaughter, attempted manslaughter, hit-and-run and reckless operation of a motor vehicle.

Shaud was a first-grader at Akili Academy. He and his siblings were walking to their bus stop Monday morning. According to Gibson, their mother was trying to balance her desire to be watchful over them and give them some independence. She'd walk them halfway across the street and stand on the neutral ground. She'd let her 10-year-old, Shaun, lead them the rest of the way. The mother was standing on the neutral ground watching, Gibson said, when the driver came flying through and struck Shaud and Shanaya.

The public can understand an accident, even one as tragic as a driver speeding through town at the exact time little children like Shaud and his siblings are walking to their bus stop.

What we can't stomach is a guy who plows into children with his car and, before speeding off, waits for one of them to be picked up off the ground like broken tree limbs after a storm.

Shaud's family would be crying this morning even if the driver had done the honorable thing: stayed on the scene until authorities arrived and stretched his wrists out to be handcuffed.

But the driver greatly intensified their pain by causing the little boy's death and speeding away from the scene.

Jarvis DeBerry can be reached at jdeberry@nola.com. Follow him at twitter.com/jarvisdeberry.